Saturday, February 16, 2008

DON'T TOSS YOUR VCR YET - Eyes On The Prize

(Continually we will spotlight films that are only available on VHS and of course are available at Rocket Video)

Maybe the most important videos inRocket are the 10 VHS tapes that make up the monumentalPBSdocumentary six-hour series Eyes On The Prize:America's Civil Rights Years 1954-1965(1987) and the four-hour follow upEyes On The Prize II: America At The Racial Crossroads 1965-1985(1990), both directed by Henry Hampton.

For years Eyes On The Prize had beenout of printdue tolegal issues over the rights to the footage, and Rocket was about the only place you could find it. Recently those thorny issues have apparently been been settled somewhat. Now PBS has been cleared to rebroadcast the epic and sell the videos for educational purposes.

This is a must. It’s a candy shop for anyone who loves historical documentaries. The footage and the recollections from the participants are perfectly placed. And it digs deep. It doesn’t just ‘hero worship’ or mythize it also reveals the in fighting and complicated legal and political shell games played between such titans as MLK, JFK and LBJ.

ALSO OF INTEREST: currently playing on PBS I happened across a documentary on John Lewis calledCome Walk In My Shoes (2008). As one of the original students taking part in the Nashville lunch-counter boycotts and later a Freedom Rider, where he was famously almost beaten to death by asshole Alabama state troopers during the march across the bridge outside Selma much of his story is covered in Eyes on the Prize) also told beautifully inDavid Halberstam’s brilliant book “The Children”).. But this moving one-hour doc updates Lewis’s story, he later was elected to the US congress, and annually takes his fellow politicians on a tour of the freedom march he and others gave their nearly gave their lives for...